Marketing Master’s At The Top 100 B-Schools

In 2012, an MIT Sloan School of Management reported on their assessment of the performance of companies that effectively used data analytics – the crunching of the “big data” that’s generated in boundlessly expanding amounts in our connected world. Intelligent use of analytics “allows more-accurate predictions, better decisions, and precise interventions, and can enable these things at seemingly limitless scale,” wrote Andrew McAfee and Erik Brynjolfsson in the Harvard Business Review. “Our statistical analysis tells us that what we’re seeing is not just a few flashy examples but a more fundamental transformation of the economy. We’ve become convinced that almost no sphere of business activity will remain untouched by this movement.”

Increasingly, schools are incorporating data science courses into their curricula, to ready students for a job market in which data analysis has become a fundamental skill for many marketers. The University of Rochester Simon School of Business even runs a pricey master’s program devoted to marketing analytics, “leveraging the power of big data to take the guesswork out of marketing,” according to the school. And that program appears to fill a need: the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics has reported that 92,000 jobs in market research analysis will be added between 2014 and 2024.